When Never Comes(10)
Christine looked at the phone in her hand. Dialing 911 wasn’t going to solve anything. She had managed to scare off one intruder, but there would be more, climbing the fence, peering in her windows, rushing her car the next time she tried to leave the house. They would never leave her alone.
Unless she wasn’t here.
With an almost eerie calm, she stood and went to the closet, pulled on a pair of jeans and a faded Patriots sweatshirt, then dragged her old weekender from the top shelf. She wouldn’t need much: jeans, a few pairs of leggings, a couple of sweaters, her toiletry case from under the bathroom sink. And the contents of the safe.
When her bag was packed, she headed for the study, ignoring the framed photo still lying facedown on the desk as she punched in the safe code, waited for the light on the keypad to go green, then blindly raked the contents into her purse: insurance policies, investment records, passports, birth certificates, and the envelope containing Stephen’s emergency cash—in case of a zombie apocalypse, he had once joked. Leave it to Stephen to think he could buy his way out of the end of world.
She closed the safe and was preparing to leave when she looked down at her left hand, at the ring that symbolized her marriage—a colorless two-carat emerald cut. Nothing but the best for the wife of Stephen Ludlow. It slid easily from her finger; apparently she’d lost weight after a week of subsisting on tea and toast. Her hand felt strangely light, but there was no sense of guilt as she placed the ring on the desk. Stephen had walked away from their marriage some time ago. Now it was her turn.
She held her breath as she peered out the front windows. As far as she could tell, the coast was still clear, no news trucks parked outside the gate, no photographers crouching in the boxwoods. Breath held, she shouldered her bags, stepped out onto the porch, and made a break for the Rover sitting in the middle of the driveway.
Her heart hammered as she scrambled up behind the wheel, locked all four doors, and started the engine. The gates slid soundlessly as she pressed the remote, and then she was through them with nothing but empty road before her.
The exhilaration was almost heady, but unsettling too as the memory of another night—another hastily packed bag, another breathless getaway—came rushing at her. It was hard not to see the irony. At the age of sixteen, she had slipped out of a house in the middle of the night and run for all she was worth. Now, twenty years later, she was running again.
FOUR
Ravenel, South Carolina
January 8, 1994
Christy-Lynn hunches deeper into her jacket as she moves down the puddled sidewalk, kicking herself for not leaving her math and science books in her locker. It’s ridiculously cold, even for January, and an icy rain is falling. She keeps her head down, drawn in like a turtle’s beneath her oversize hood, limiting her field of vision to the three feet of pavement directly in front of her.
Her hands are numb with cold, clenched into fists and thrust deep in her pockets. Her apartment key is there. She turns it over in her fingers, already anticipating the cup of hot chocolate she’ll make when she reaches the apartment—if there’s any left. At this point, she’ll settle for tea. As long as it’s hot.
She quickens her pace when the sign for the Palm Manor Apartments comes into view, the painted letters flaking off into what might once have been a garden, but is now just a muddy puddle littered with candy wrappers and cigarette butts. Only a few more steps and she’ll be inside, warm and dry, with a mug of something hot to drink. And her copy of The Outsiders.
It was supposed to be homework for Mrs. Kendrick’s English class, but it didn’t feel like homework at all. How could reading be work when you got to meet people and go places you’d never be able to go in real life? She smiles as she thinks of Cherry and Ponyboy, the movie-star-handsome Sodapop. They have become her friends, outsiders like her, from the wrong side of town. Except they have one another, and she has no one, a freak loner from an entirely different world than kids who wore name-brand jeans and went home to real houses. It might be nice to belong to a gang—not the drug-selling, gun-toting kind of gang—just a few kids who wouldn’t tease her for wearing thrift store clothes and bringing her lunch in a brown paper bag.
She’s still weighing the pros and cons of gang membership when the rain-drenched quiet is broken by a sharp string of oaths. “Goddamn rain! Every goddamn time I gotta boot somebody out, it goddamn rains!”
Christy-Lynn jerks her head up, knocking the hood back from her face as she searches for the source of the swearing, then freezes when she spots a mound of clothing and furniture on the soaking wet steps outside their apartment. And then she’s running with the rain in her eyes and a knot in her stomach, running toward a man carrying the mismatched lamps her mother had brought home from Goodwill a few months back.
“What are you doing? That’s our stuff!”
“And that’s my apartment,” the man says, jerking a thumb at the open apartment door. He’s tall and beefy, wearing a soggy wife-beater and dirty gray overalls. “’Less you got six hundred dollars on you. But I’m guessin’ you don’t—any more than your mama did.”
“But you can’t! She isn’t even here!”
“I can,” he barks back. As if to make his point, he drops both lamps onto the soggy heap of household belongings. The larger of the two rolls off the pile and onto the pavement with a sickening pop as the bulb implodes. “Says so right in the lease your old lady signed when she moved in. Two months late, you’re out.”